Professor Russell took a quick look through the opening before Gallono closed it tight and began welding the other side along the top, then moved on to fuse together the vertical gap between the two doors.
“I saw three or four of them running up the corridor,” Brian reported. “It looked like one was carrying a relic and using it as a light source.”
Gallono let out a frustrated huff while he worked. “It also probably serves as their means of communicating with the rest of their forces. The relics all exist in some state of collective consciousness. Having a relic with each group out in the field would be an ideal way to stay coordinated even when electronic communications are down. Plus they’re a decent source of light, especially if you get them a little agitated.”
Gallono paused in his welding when he reached the floor to look at the professor. “Tell me, how bright was it?”
“Like a second sun,” Brian answered, drawing a confident grin from Gallono as he repositioned to weld along the door hinge side of the frame.
“Good. That means they’re worried,” Gallono managed to say just before a colossal impact hit the door from the other side. Gallono stood up and looked at his work with pride. The doors did not even budge a single millimeter under the impacts. “I’d say they’re very worried.”
“Now let’s see about helping Chin rig this place to blow before they come through our only way out,” Gallono said while turning around.
Brian followed his turn and was about to give a Gallono congratulatory pat on the back. Instead he found of two pistols trained on them that forced him to freeze mid motion and simply raise both his hands into the air.
“Chin, what the hell are you doing?” Alex demanded. “You should have this place almost ready to blow by now.”
“We’re not destroying this chamber,” Chin responded with a sinister finality to his words. “This room is everything I could have hoped for and more when I retrieved the two of you from his custody.”
“Maybe, but it is also regenerating an indestructible army that is taking over your country,” Frank countered. “Do what’s right for your people, your government. Blow the place up and be a hero.”
Chin must have sensed Gallono subtly pacing toward him. He took a few steps back and trained his aim on the alien and Frank, by far the two most dangerous people in the room. “No, I don’t think so. I’m the one who opened the chamber and unleashed their forces. I’d face a firing squad, and they would send the bill for the bullets to my parents. No, the only way this ends well for me is if we get the technology. All will be forgiven then.”
“Well, at least you’re betraying us for a cause that’s both selfless and noble,” Gallono mused. “Your sense of honor must know no bounds.”
“What about your sense of safety?” Frank added. “They regenerate, you can’t stop them.”
Chin looked to the flame setting on the floor just outside the southern doorway. He flipped his head toward Gallono. “Looks like his people have managed to stop them from doing that.”
“For how long?” Frank countered while looking ready to take his chances with a charge. “They were accessing the locations of your nuclear silos. How long until they tear somebody’s arm off who knows the access codes? Then they make the Giza Plateau glow in the dark along with anyone else who tries to stop them.”
“They caught us off guard,” Chin countered. “We’ll adapt. We have over 1.3 billion people in my country. We have the largest land army on earth. They have fewer than 7,000 clay figures to play with. The weight of large numbers is on our side. Just ask the Germans in WWII how it worked out facing an extremely numerous army in Russia.”
“An individual who was there happens to be standing here telling you that your assessment is dead wrong,” Gallono shouted. “I’ll be happy to discuss the subject further with you when this is all over, but for right now you need to stop acting like a lunatic and destroy this chamber.”
“Not a chance. Now pick up that welding lance and set it outside the south door on the opposite side from the explosives.”
Gallono vented a frustrated huff and threw his hands out to the side in disgust. “Fine. Do you mind if I put an end to that relic over there while I’m at it? It’s providing valuable intelligence to his friends on the other side of that door.”
“I am very curious to see how you accomplish that. The rest of you stay here while Commander Gallono and I run a little experiment,” Chin ordered.
Professor Russell watched as Gallono picked up his welding equipment and carried it over to the southern door with Chin holding him at gunpoint while maintaining a safe ten-foot gap between them.
“What’s the play after this,” Gallono asked. “Are you going to shoot all four of us?”
“What do you care,” Chin countered. “From what I hear you will regenerate just like these Alpha relics.”
When Gallono glanced back at Chin, Brian was quite certain he saw real fear in the alien’s eyes at that moment. It was possible Chin was incorrect with that assumption. Perhaps the interference preventing the Alpha from doing their thing disrupted the Novi’s ability to regenerate as well.
“I’m going to light the welding torch now,” Gallono announced. Next, he crouched down and applied the intense flame to the Alpha relic.
At first, the thing was not phased in the least, but that soon changed. The life force began to cry out in an agonizing death wail that rivaled the final moments of a person being burned at the stake. The once vibrant flame sputtered three times in rapid succession before evaporating into nothing and taking the ear-piercing shrieks with it.
Chin cringed at the violent assault on his ears, which gave Gallono an opportunity. He dove across the open doorway and reached with the flaming end of his welding torch for the nearest bag of explosives, but Chin must have been expecting the move. The Chinese operative stepped on the gas line, which brought it to a dead stop midflight and ripped it from Gallono’s still traveling grasp.
Gallono performed a tuck roll, sprung back to his feet, stepped up onto the door and launched himself back toward Chin in one beautifully fluid motion. Unfortunately, Chin was prepared for that as well and pulled the trigger twice with time to spare. Gallono sustained two hits to the right side of his chest and dropped to the floor.
Chin was without mercy. He stepped forward and delivered a kick to the ribs that sent Gallono rolling back into the burial chamber. One more kick to the stomach sent Gallono ten feet further in and gave Chin enough time to close the door behind him and begin the process of welding it shut from the outside.
Chapter 40: This Is Liberation?
In the life of a soldier some days are better than others. A good day consisted of taking an enemy position without casualties and celebrating like it was your last day on earth with your comrades. When your position got overrun and you had to leave behind your fallen brothers, those were the bad days. For Valnor and his men who were rapidly advancing through southern Poland towards Berlin, Germany, it had been a string of very good days for all of them.
Spirits were high as they handed their German adversaries one defeat after another. The red tide was rising and spilling into German territories that contained riches the Soviet soldiers had never seen before in their lives. Silver dinnerware sets, crystal chandeliers, gold jewelry, fashionable suits and dresses. The plunder was extraordinary. In fact, the overwhelming sentiment of the men was ‘why did these people attack us? They have everything and we had nothing.’ It had been a good few months, but Valnor had a feeling this day would be one of the worst.
As Valnor’s men marched westward through an unremarkable stretch of farmland, the first ominous omen was the change of scent in the air. A shift of wind from the northwest brought with it an indescribably foul stench of death and decay. Knowing that foul breeze originated from his target, Valnor ordered his men to follow the smell, which grew more pungent as they drew closer to the source.
Ten minutes later, Valnor was summoned to t
he most forward position where his infantry had made contact with some Germans. He arrived expecting to find a brigade of German soldiers dug in with machine gun nests firing away. Instead, he saw his senior officer speaking with a group of four men wearing tattered and stained clothing with the thick horizontal striping of a prison uniform. The full grown, emaciated men could not have weighed more than eighty pounds.
“They claim to be German political prisoners who escaped from a facility located about a mile west of here,” the battalion leader reported.
Valnor eyed one of the suspects and noticed under all the dirt and grime on his clothing a faded gold star with six points sewn over his left breast. “I believe them. Those gold stars on their chest, they’re just like the stars that the Polish army found on prisoners in the Majdanek camp when they liberated it a few weeks ago.”
“These men claim the German guards just up and left several days ago as we were approaching, but why wouldn’t we see more of them running for freedom?” the battalion leader asked, suspecting it might be some sort of trap.
“The other prisoners probably can’t,” Valnor replied. “Look at them. It’s the middle of winter and they’re wearing nothing but a paper-thin prison uniform. No coats, no gloves or boots, and they’ve obviously been starved half to death. It’s amazing they can find the strength to walk ten feet, let alone a mile.”
“Give them something to eat and then have them show us the way to this prison camp,” Valnor ordered.
A half hour later, Valnor found himself leading a group of two hundred soldiers through the front gates of a prison camp named Auschwitz. The nameplate said work camp, but the place clearly served a darker purpose.
When they opened the gates, Valnor and his men saw one barrack, then the next, on and on for a hundred barracks. They saw people, just a few dotting the compound. The first men they found outside the camp were thin and obviously malnourished, but these prisoners were on a whole other level of suffering and starvation. They were nothing but skin draped over a set of frail bones. None of them moved; they could not even manage to turn their heads. They simply stood like dead people with a hollowed out body and soul.
One of Valnor’s officers shouted in Russian, “The Soviet Army liberates you!” but they did not understand the language. Valnor repeated the phrase in German, which did elicit a response.
Three walking skeletons nearby collapsed to the ground in tears while a man and woman, completely naked in the freezing cold, fell to Valnor’s feet and tried kissing his boots saying, “Is it true? Is it real?”
Valnor removed his overcoat and draped it over the groveling woman. He quickly unfastened his long-sleeved uniform shirt and gave it to the man. Now standing there in his undershirt with the frosty wind nipping at him, Valnor began to understand the misery of these people’s lives.
Valnor turned to his chief adjutant and said, “Bring the army here; all of it. I want every single man from Army Group Center to walk through this camp and know what sort of enemy we’re facing. Have every last man go from barracks to barracks. They will bear witness to the extreme depravity of which those German aggressors are capable. As God as my witness, we will revisit this barbarism upon them tenfold.”
“Yes sir,” the officer acknowledged and departed the liberated camp to enact the order.
Others under Valnor’s command, including officers, pleaded with him to let them leave the awful site, but their requests were denied. Instead, he ordered them to accompany him while they inspected the barracks. The first one they came to had a sign over the door ‘damas’ – women.
When Valnor opened the door, all he saw was blood and dead people strewn about the racks of beds and on the floor. Away from the carnage in a dark corner a handful of grown women, who could not have weighed more than fifty pounds each, sat naked on the floor huddling together for warmth.
The stench, oh the rancid stink, was all consuming. It was all Valnor and his men could do to stay in the barracks more than a few minutes at a time.
“Please General, let us go. We can’t stay. This is unbelievable,” a soldier pleaded.
He disregarded the words, what was this man’s mild discomfort compared to these prisoners who were the source of such a foul aroma. Valnor pulled his undershirt off over his head and tossed it toward the quivering women. When he did not immediately see several sets of coats soon follow, Valnor turned and shouted at his men. “What in the hell is wrong with you? Give them something to wear until the Russian Red Cross can arrive to properly handle this.”
Four coats immediately landed on the floor in front of the women. Valnor himself had to look away. The sight was too much to handle. He stepped bare-chested back out into the freezing cold and progressed to the next structure, which housed men; it was the same as the women’s barracks. Dead bodies interspersed among naked, flesh colored skeletons huddled together in an attempt to stave off hypothermia.
Barracks after barracks yielded the same sight. Everyone was naked, or wore thin prison cloths, with no shoes in the middle of January. Only a few people could talk, the others lacked the required energy. A few people were able to communicate, some speaking only a syllable at a time. They told the soldiers that once a day they were given a little water. No bread, not anything to eat. If someone died, the other prisoners took the clothes to get a little warmth any way they could.
Thousands upon thousands died from hunger and the cold in those buildings. It was shocking, devastating, but the worst was yet to come. At the end of a long row of barracks they came to a door labeled ‘kinder’ – children.
Inside there were only two children alive, all the others had been killed in gas chambers or were taken to the ‘hospital’ where Nazi doctors and scientists performed medical experiments on them. As they entered, the children began franticly screaming, “We are not Jews!” over and over as if openly denying their heritage would save their lives. They knew full well what had happened to the others.
It was all so thoroughly terrible that the men’s minds, even the most hardened veterans, could not absorb it. Valnor ordered his troops to start cooking chicken and vegetable soup, but the former prisoners could not eat it because their stomachs had tightened shut like a clinched fist. They had to start small eating just the broth for several days.
Once Valnor completed his inspection of the barracks buildings, he moved on to the solid brick structures with tall chimneys rising above the camp. The course of the sun crossing the day’s sky caused long, dark shadows of those god-awful chimneys to touch everything inside the camp at some point. Within those horrid structures, Valnor found a row of four cremation ovens whose fires, according to the records they found, consumed the flesh of nearly a million Jews in this camp alone.
In the adjacent structure, his soldiers opened the doors to a warehouse that contained 370,000 men’s suits, 840,000 women’s garments, and 17,000 pounds of human hair. At that point, it became too much for even Valnor to maintain his impassive façade for his men to see. He had to get out of that place of pure evil.
On his way out of the camp grounds, Valnor passed under a wrought iron archway that served as the entrance. Outside he spotted four camp survivors huddled around a trashcan fire nursing a cup of chicken broth. He found it so odd that all four men were looking up at the archway and actually smiling. What could possibly bring them joy about that entrance?
He turned and found three German words imbedded and boldly displayed as part of the archway, ‘ARBEIT MACHT FRET’ – Work Makes You Free. Valnor found the words to be disgustingly mocking and stood ready to chastise the four men smiling toward it.
“What in the world about that sign makes you smile?” Valnor demanded of the men in his broken German; he was a little rusty.
One of them who looked at least modestly healthy pointed toward the letter ‘B’. “You see that letter how the bigger loop is on top with the smaller one below? Most people shape the letter with the little loop on top. The prisoners who were forced to make
that sign hung the letter upside down as an act of defiance to let those entering know the exact opposite was the case. Our Nazi captors never knew. That tiny act of defiance gave all of us hope and strength to survive our ordeal. I’d be dead now for sure if that upside-down letter ‘B’ wasn’t there.”
Valnor looked back at the archway one last time and could not help but crack a smile himself now knowing the inside joke.
“You are going to get them, right?” another prisoner asked with hope draped over every word. “You are going to make them pay for what they’ve done here?”
“Not just here,” Valnor corrected. “We are finding camps like this all over. The Nazis and all the Germans who stood by and knowingly let this happen are going to pay with their lives and the chastity of their women. Every soldier under my command will bear witness to these atrocities before we move on to Berlin. The Germans will know the meaning of suffering at the hands of my men; you can be assured of that. Our wrath will be a thing of legend and cause the bowels of every German to turn to water when we approach to inflict our revenge, yours and mine, upon them all. You have my word.”
Chapter 41: The Coward’s Way Out
It was April 20th, and Tomal had been looking forward to this day for some time. Since moving his wife and six children into the Führer bunker beneath the Chancellery building in Berlin everyone had been so depressed. He could not blame them since the concrete bunker, though well furnished and comfortable, was in essence a concrete prison for Hitler, his top aides, and their families.
The Red Army shocked everyone by taking as much as twenty-five miles per day of territory toward the capital city. By the time anyone realized what was happening, all avenues out of the city were cut off. The leadership’s only remaining safe haven was the two-story bunker constructed thirty feet underground and surrounded by concrete walls that ran fifteen feet thick. It was the safest place on earth; nothing could touch it.
Origins: The Reich Page 25